AT Think

The Senate voted down an attempt to repeal $35 billion in tax breaks handed out to oil and natural gas companies, even as Washington professed to be getting tough with the oil companies.

IMGCAP(1)] The number one source of new business for accountants is referrals. But when I ask partners of CPA firms how many really good or “A” referral sources they have, they can often count the number on one hand. That means that even if they get one good referral per referral source per year, that’s less than five per year. That’s certainly not enough to sustain, let alone grow a practice.

Trading in the shares of a British accounting firm, Vantis, has been suspended on the London-based AIM exchange after the firm admitted that it may not be able to continue trading on a going concern basis.

Here’s something you don’t hear everyday – an accounting firm actually owning and liking the fact that they are well, boring. One Sacramento-based firm has even gone so far as to rebrand itself with the tagline “Proud to be Boring Accountants.”

Computer maker Dell has recorded a $100 million liability on its books in order to establish a reserve for the “potential settlement” of a long-running investigation by the SEC of the company’s accounting practices.

With college graduations at hand, accounting majors entering the job market face a sobering reality. No, it’s not the U.S. unemployment rate, which stands at 9.7 percent. Rather, it’s the milquetoast reputation that dogs the accounting profession.

Sen. John McCain has posted a sympathetic tweet on his Twitter account in response to a lament from one of the stars of the MTV series, “Jersey Shore,” about the new indoor tanning tax.

IMGCAP(1)] Going into my freshman year at Roger Williams University, I knew the academics would be a somewhat leap from my high school years. First off, I was an accounting major who knew nothing about business.

Movie and television companies are worried about New Jersey eliminating tax breaks that have helped defray the cost of filming shows like “The Sopranos” in the Garden State.

Back in the ‘60s, accounting students aka interns at Southfield, Mich.-based Plante & Moran worked in the firm’s proofreading department to review financial reports. Today, they work on client engagements and visit clients’ places of business.